Diary

The architecture of you.

Walking, Misty told Peter about the chemistry of painting. How physical beauty turns out to be chemistry and geometry and anatomy. Art is really science. Discovering why people like something is so you can replicate it. Copy it. It’s a paradox, “creating” a real smile. Rehearsing again and again a spontaneous moment of horror. All the sweat and boring effort that goes into creating what looks easy and instant.

When people look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, they need to know that carbon black paint is the soot from natural gas. The color rose madder is the ground root of the madder plant. Emerald green is copper acetoarsenite, also called Paris green and used as an insecticide. A poison. Tyrian purple is made from clams.

And Peter, he slid the painting out from under his sweater. Alone in the gallery with no one around to see, the painting of a stone house behind a picket fence, he pressed it to the wall. And there it was, the signature of Misty Marie Kleinman. And Peter said, “I told you someday your work would hang in a museum.”

His eyes are deep Egyptian brown, the paint made from ground-up mummies, bone ash and asphalt, and used until the nineteenth century, when artists discovered that icky reality. After twisting years of brushes between their lips.

Peter kissing the back of her neck, Misty said how when you look at the Mona Lisa, you need to remember that burnt sienna is just clay colored with iron and manganese and cooked in an oven. Sepia brown is the ink sacs from cuttlefish. Dutch pink is crushed buckhorn berries.

Peter’s perfect tongue licked the back of her ear. Something, but not a painting, felt stiff inside his clothes.

And Misty whispered, “Indian yellow is the urine of cattle fed mango leaves.”

Peter wrapped one arm around her shoulders. With his other arm, he pressed the back of her knee so it buckled. He lowered her to the gallery’s marble floor, and Peter said, “ Te amo,Misty.”

Just for the record, this came as a little surprise.

His weight on top of her, Peter said, “You think you know so much,” and he kissed her.

Art, inspiration, love, they’re all so easy to dissect. To explain away.

The paint colors iris green and sap green are the juice of flowers. The color of Cappagh brown is Irish dirt, Misty whispered. Cinnabar is vermilion ore shot from high Spanish cliffs with arrows. Bistre is the yellowy brown soot of burnt beech wood. Every masterpiece is just dirt and ash put together in some perfect way.

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

Even while they kissed, you closed your eyes.

And Misty kept hers open, not watching you, but the earring in your ear. Silver tarnished almost brown, holding a knot of square-cut glass diamonds, twinkling and buried in the black hair falling over your shoulders— that’s what Misty loved.

That first time, Misty kept telling you, “The paint color Davy’s gray is powdered slate. Bremen blue is copper hydroxide and copper carbonate—a deadly poison.” Misty said, “Brilliant scarlet is iodine and mercury. The color bone black is charred bones . . .”

August 16

THE COLOR BONE BLACK is charred bones.

Shellac is the shit aphids leave on leaves and twigs. Drop black is burnt grapevines. Oil paints use the oil of crushed walnuts or poppy seeds. The more you know about art, the more it sounds like witchcraft. Everything crushed and mixed and baked, the more it could be cooking.

Misty was still talking, talking, talking, but this was days later, in gallery after gallery. This was in a museum, with her painting of a tall stone church pasted to the wall between a Monet and a Renoir. With Misty sitting on the cold floor straddling Peter between her legs. It was late afternoon, and the museum was deserted. Peter’s perfect head of black hair pressed hard on the floor, he was reaching up, both his hands inside her sweater, thumbing her nipples.

Both your hands.

Behavioral psychologists say that humans copulate face-to-face because of breasts. Females with larger breasts attracted more partners, who insisted on breast play during intercourse. More sex bred more females, who inherited the larger breasts. That begat more face-to-face sex.

Now, here on the floor, Peter’s hands, his breast play, his erection sliding around inside his pants, Misty’s thighs spread above him, she said how when William Turner painted his masterpiece of Hannibal crossing the Alps to slaughter the Salassian army, Turner based it on a hike he took in the Yorkshire countryside.

Another example of everything being a self-portrait.

Misty told Peter what you learn in art history. That Rembrandt slopped his paint on so thick that people joked you could lift each portrait by its nose.

Her hair hung heavy with sweat down over her face. Her chubby legs trembled, exhausted but still holding her up. Dry-humping the lump in his pants.

Peter’s fingers clutched her breasts tighter. His hips pushed up, and his face, his orbicularis oculi, squeezed his eyes shut. His triangularis pulled the corners of his mouth down so his bottom teeth showed. His coffee- yellowed teeth bit at the air.

A hot wetness pulsed out of Misty, and Peter’s erection was pulsing inside his pants, and everything else stopped. They both stopped breathing for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven long moments.

Then they both wilted. Withering. Peter’s body relaxed onto the wet floor. Misty’s flattened onto him. Both of them, their clothes were pasted together with sweat.

The painting of the tall church looked down from the wall.

And right then, a museum guard walked up.

August 20—The Third-Quarter Moon

GRACE’S VOICE, in the dark, it tells Misty, “The work you’re doing will buy your family freedom.” It says, “No summer people will come back here for decades.”

Unless Peter wakes up someday, Grace and Misty are the only Wilmots left.

Unless you wake up, there won’t be any more Wilmots.

You can hear the slow, measured sound of Grace cutting something with scissors.

Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. There’s no point rebuilding the family fortune. Let the house go to the Catholics. Let the summer people swarm over the island. With Tabbi dead, the Wilmots have no stake in the future. No investment.

Grace says, “Your work is a gift to the future, and anyone who tries to stop you will be cursed by history.”

While Misty paints, Grace’s hands circle her waist with something, then her arms, her neck. It’s something that rubs her skin, light and soft.

“Misty dear, you have a seventeen-inch waist,” Grace says.

It’s a tape measure.

Something smooth slips between her lips, and Grace’s voice says, “It’s time you took another pill.” A drinking straw pokes into her mouth, and Misty sips enough water to swallow the capsule.

In 1819, Theodore Gericault painted his masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa . It showed the ten castaways that survived out of one hundred and forty-seven people left adrift on a raft for two weeks after their ship sank. At the time, Gericault had just abandoned his pregnant mistress. To punish himself, he shaved his head. He saw no friends for almost two years, never going out in public. He was twenty-seven and lived in isolation, painting. Surrounded by the dying people and cadavers he studied for his masterpiece. After several suicide attempts, he died at thirty-two.

Grace says, “We all die.” She says, “The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”

She runs the tape measure down the length of Misty’s legs.

Something cold and smooth slides against Misty’s cheek, and Grace’s voice tells her, “Feel.” Grace says,